A Systemic Approach to the Preservation of Audio Documents: Methodology and Software Tools

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering Volume 2013, Article ID 489515, 21 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/489515 Research Article A Systemic Approach to the Preservation of Audio Documents: Methodology and Software Tools Federica Bressan1 and Sergio Canazza2 1 Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, Strada Le Grazie 15, 34134 Verona, Italy 2 Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, via G. Gradenigo 6/B, 35131 Padova, Italy Correspondence should be addressed to Federica Bressan; [email protected] Received 10 December 2012; Revised 19 February 2013; Accepted 21 February 2013 Academic Editor: Filippo Stanco Copyright © 2013 F. Bressan and S. Canazza. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper presents a methodology for the preservation of audio documents, the operational protocol that acts as the methodology, and an original open source software system that supports and automatizes several tasks along the process. The methodology is presented in the light of the ethical debate that has been challenging the international archival community for the last thirty years. The operational protocol reflects the methodological principles adopted by the authors, and its effectiveness is based on the results obtained in recent research projects involving some of the finest audio archives in Europe. Some recommendations are given for the rerecording process, aimed at minimizing the information loss and at quantifying the unintentional alterations introduced by the technical equipment. Finally, the paper introduces an original software system that guides and supports the preservation staff along the process, reducing the processing timing, automatizing tasks, minimizing errors, and using information hiding strategies to ease the cognitive load. Currently the software system is in use in several international archives. 1. Introduction In an official technical report, the UNESCO [2]claims that over half of the cultural patrimony of the world is at seri- Computer science offers multiple possibilities to study the ous risk of vanishing, despite the attention that a topic such fields of humanities: a major topic that has been rapidly grow- as cultural heritage preservation has attracted, especially by ing along the past decades is the implementation of computer theEuropeanUnionwhichprovedgreatawarenessinfinanc- engineering in musical cultural heritage, with a particular ing a number of research projects in this field. relation to the audio documents preservation (“ideally, an The factors that obstruct the safeguard of audiovisual audio preservation workflow would also involve the services documents are multiple: mainly the massive investment of of a specialized programmer” [1]). human and economical resources required by digitization Scholars and the general public started paying greater campaigns, not to mention teams with multidisciplinary attention to the recordings of musical events and to their competences, difficult and expensive to form. As a conse- value, at a personal/collective level and for cultural/entertain- quence, today many archives are in fact lacking method- ment purposes. However, a systematic preservation and the ological and technological tools to safeguard adequately their fruition of these documents is complicated by their diversi- patrimony. fied nature: recordings contain information on their artistic The process of physical degradation that characterizes and cultural existence that goes beyond the audio signal itself. every type of audio carriers can be slowed down, by means In this sense, a faithful and satisfying access to the audio doc- of correct preservation policies, but not stopped. Therefore, ument cannot be achieved without its associated contextual the survival of the information contained in the document is information, that is, to all the content-independent informa- possible only renouncing to its materiality, through a constant tion represented by the container, the signs on the carrier, the transfer of the information onto new carriers. Unfortu- accompanying material, and so on. nately the remediation process (the operation of transferring 2 Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering the information from a medium to another medium)issubject audio information stored in obsolete formats and carriers is in to electronic, procedural, and operative errors. In addition, risk of disappearing. To this end, the audio preservation com- it easily indulges to the aesthetic changes of the current munityintroducedtheconcept“preservethecontent,notthe times. Consequently, a total neutrality in the process of the carrier.” Audio (and video) preservation must therefore be information transfer is not realistic, which puts the spotlight based on digital copying of contents. Consequently, analogue on the philological problem of the documents authenticity. holdings must be digitized. At the end of the 20th century, The recording of an acoustic event can never be a neutral the traditional “preserve the original” paradigm shifted to operation because the timbre quality and the plastic value the “distribution is preservation” [4] idea of digitizing the of the recorded sound, which are of great importance in, for audio content and making it available using digital libraries example, contemporary music, are already influenced by the technology. Now the importance of transferring into the positioning of the microphones used during the recording. digital domain (active preservation) is clear, namely, for In addition, the processing carried out by the Tonmeister is carriers in risk of disappearing, respecting the indications of a real interpretative element added to the recording of the theinternationalarchivecommunity[8–12]. event. The term Tonmeister3 [ ] describes a person who has a For the longest time, the word “archive” has been suggest- detailed theoretical and practical knowledge of all aspects of ingimagesofshelvesandbooks.Itisonlyrecentlythataudio- soundrecording.But,unlikeasoundengineer,he/shemust visual material, first labeled as nonbook material (the only way be also deeply musically trained: musicological and historic- to define it was in contrast with books), earned the right to be critical competence are essential for the individuation and stored in a controlled environment, next to the books, and to correct cataloguing of the information contained in audio be regarded as worthy of permanent preservation. However, documents. Thus, musicological and historic-critical compe- their inclusion has not been completely painless. It forced the tence becomes essential for the individuation and correct cat- archives to update their storage facilities and to plan radically aloguing of the information contained in audio documents. new access strategies. Multimedia documents encompass a Beingmadeofunstablebasematerials,soundcarriersare large variety of carriers and formats and require special moresubjecttodamagecausedbyinadequatehandling.The equipment to access their content. Whereas traditional media commingling of a technical and scientific formation with and tools remained in the possession of artists and curators, historic-philological knowledge (important for the individ- the multimedia technical and technological load has defi- uation and correct cataloguing of the information contained nitely reduced the autonomy of these cultural actors [13]. in audio documents) becomes essential for preservative re- Traditional criteria for conservation—a document’s origi- recording operations, going beyond mere analog-to-digital nality, longevity, and inherent economic value—are not appli- (A/D) transfer: “the development of successful preservation cable to multimedia documents. Archivists were faced with strategies will require the cooperation of computer scientists, unprecedented problems that transcended their field of data storage experts, data distribution experts, fieldworkers, expertise, aggravated by the complex nature of multimedia librarians, and folklorists” [4]. documents and by their content, which cannot be accessed As far as audio memories are concerned, preservation is without mediation technology. divided in passive (also referred to as preventative preserva- In the last thirty years, the awareness for the preservation tion) and active preservation, which involves data transfer of audio documents has increased, allowing them in the onto new media. Passive preservation is further divided definition of cultural heritage. At the same time, the debate into indirect (covering the maintenance of proper storage on the ethics of preservation got more lively and the tools to conditions, establishing professional handling procedures, activate the preservation practices have become richer. More etc.) and direct (the carrier is treated in order to stabilize its recently, audio recordings have been recognized as an impor- physical condition, but its structure and composition are not tant documentary source for scientific research in the fields altered). of linguistics, history, sociology, musicology, and other dis- It is worth noting that, in the Eighties/Nineties of the 20th ciplines. Their dignity has been equaled to that traditionally century, expert associations were still concerned about the reserved to bibliographic sources, revealing once more the use

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